Manuel Gonzales - The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

Colleen shook her head. “Fuck Henry, man. If he’s not here, then we definitely shouldn’t be here either.”

Rose hesitated. She looked around the hotel suite, looked at the minibar she’d wanted to tear into but hadn’t because she wanted to share it with the others.

She’d imagined champagne toasts and a late night recounting all the shit that had gone down. She didn’t know where she’d gotten the idea there’d be champagne, but that was what she’d settled on.

“Come on, Rose,” Colleen said. “There’s a car downstairs. We need to go now.”

“What about your wrist?” Rose asked, but by then Colleen had already grabbed Rose’s go-bag and thrown it at her and then she was out the door and on her way to the elevator and Rose didn’t have much choice but to follow after her.

“What about the others?” Rose asked.

They were stuck on Canal Street waiting to slip into the Holland Tunnel and out of the city.

“Are we picking up any of the others?” she asked.

Colleen shook her head, honked at a truck trying to pull out in front of them. “What others?” she said. “As far as I know, you and me are what’s left, and that’s it.” She checked her blind spot before squeezing in behind a yellow cab. “I almost didn’t even go to the hotel.”

“Wendy?” Rose asked.

Colleen shook her head.

“Becka? Windsor, Jimmie?”

“Look, Rose, what do you want from me? I don’t know, I wasn’t with them.” She let go of the steering wheel and pressed her palms into her eyes even though the car continued to idle forward, listed to the left. Rose reached for the wheel, but Colleen beat her to it. “But Wendy,” she said. “Wendy’s gone, I know that much.”

And then they stopped talking about it and then they drove to Philadelphia.

“Why Philadelphia?” Rose asked.

“Who is going to look for us in Philadelphia?” Colleen answered.

Rose offered to drive but Colleen wouldn’t let her. She drove them to the airport, then parked in the long-term parking lot. Rose hadn’t asked her where she’d gotten the car. She’d just assumed Colleen had stolen it.

“Here we go,” Colleen said.

“What do you mean, here we go? What do we do now?”

Colleen handed her a thick manila envelope. “Everything you need is in here. Everything you need and half of everything Wendy needed.” She took a shaky breath. “Might as well, right?”

“But,” Rose said.

“Whatever you want. That’s what you do now. Just. Not with me.” Then she smiled and gave Rose a kiss on the cheek and whispered, “See you around, okay?”

“No you won’t,” Rose said, and she wasn’t going to cry, though no one would have blamed her for it — it had been a long day, a long two years — but she was very close to punching Colleen in her face, and Colleen probably wouldn’t have blamed her for that, either.

Colleen stepped back — maybe she could sense Rose’s body tense up — and laughed and said, “Probably not,” and she turned and started walking. Rose followed after, waiting for Colleen to stop, to turn around, to slap her straight, to tell her to grow up, to tell her to find her own way, to stop following her like some lost little puppy, to go find her own fucking life, but she didn’t. Colleen kept walking, and then, Rose didn’t know how, she lost herself in the crowd.

The envelope had money in it — cash, prepaid credit cards, securities set up in her name, or, rather, her fake name. A couple of burner phones, a new set of identification, a slip of paper with different contacts encoded on it — Mexican, European, South Asian, Australian. A few amulets and crystals — that would’ve been Windsor, who was all about protective amulets and shit — and a small jeweler’s pouch with a plastic spider ring inside it and a note attached with “Decoder Ring” written on it in Henry’s handwriting.

She slipped the spider ring on her finger just in case it had been magicked or imbued with some kind of power, but no. Just one of Henry’s jokes.

Hardy-fucking-har-har, Henry.

The idea of buying a plane ticket, of locking herself in a large metal tube as it hurtled across the country in the nighttime sky, made her queasy, so she took a bus instead from the airport to a Greyhound station. She bought a ticket to Chicago from there but stepped off the bus in Cleveland, and there boarded another bus headed to Houston, where she stole a car and drove it down to Brownsville, and then, early the next morning, among all the abuelitas walking across the river into work, she crossed the border into Matamoros and there slipped quietly out of sight.

A month later, she made contact with a guy in Monterrey and took a freelance gig rooting out narcoterrorists but she and the guy who’d hired her had irreconcilable differences that resulted in her fist connecting with his nut sack, and she left right after that for Cuba, where she heard a rumor of some supernatural flimflammery going on. This turned out to be a pack of werewolves, one of whom had been some kind of geneticist before and who was hard at work on not any kind of cure but a means for making the change permanent and maintaining his manly intelligence while wolfed out. But a couple of women from the new and improved Regional Office got there just as she did and Rose spent a week hiding out in an abandoned grocery store until they’d packed up and left.

Every once in a while she went hunting for anyone else from training camp and the assault, but they were either all dead or just plain better at low-profiling it than she was.

She took shit job after shit job working for some real assholes, not because she needed the money but because she didn’t know what to do with herself.

Twice she filled out college applications, and once she even went as far as to mail them off but had moved — three times, in fact — before the acceptances could find her.

Then she took a job with this guy Jonathan, a straightforward heist of some mystical artifacts, she didn’t know what they did or who they were stealing them for, and didn’t care, frankly. She was smarter, stronger, faster, and more powerful than Jonathan, but also she wanted to sleep with him, mostly because his girlfriend — who was running technical and mystical backup on the job — didn’t trust her, assumed she was some kind of physical and sexual threat, which made Rose want to be those things if only so she could shove it back in her face and tell her, Self-fulfilling prophecy, bitch. Anyway, the job was simple. Break in, grab the shit, break out again, and sure, it was a high-security place, but wasn’t she the one who broke into the Fortress of Living Flame, which, before she’d shown up, had been protected by eternal, magical flames for a millennium, if not longer? She could handle the security for a simple breaking-and-entering, except she’d been distracted, had overlooked a mystical rune or two, had walked right through a mystical barrier that dropped her into the bottom of the Mariana Trench, and she had just enough time to think to herself, Oh, shit, what a fucking loser way to fucking die, except really she got only so far as, O, before blacking out, and when she woke up, it was to the face and voice of the girlfriend, who dabbed her forehead gently with a warm, wet cloth, and who, when she saw Rose open her eyes, said, “I could have left you there, I just want you to remember that. I thought about it. I thought about leaving your ass down there. Don’t forget that,” and Rose didn’t.

In fact, that job was what drew the line for Rose, what broke the camel’s back, what eventually sent her back home.

After that job, the trajectory of her life weighed heavily on her.

After that little drop in the Mariana, after that little talk from Jonathan’s whiny girlfriend, Rose thought long and hard about her life choices before, during, and after her little (and unsatisfying) romp with Jonathan. She thought about it on the plane back to the States, and then on the bus from Dallas to her shitty little hometown. She thought about it every time she thought about killing her sister, who was putting her up for a little while until she found her own place, figured out the rest of her life, but who was fucking driving her insane every minute of every day. She thought about it whenever she ran into some yokel from her past who couldn’t think of her as anything more than Margaret’s youngest, the pretty one itching for trouble. She thought about it when she put the money down on this storefront and the inventory to stock it. She thought about it all the fucking time, if you really must know, and figured that thinking about it was enough, that thinking about it equaled change.